The fiction and fantasy of Chad Anctil

Post-Necronomicon Creative Crisis

So Necronomicon Providence 2015 has come and gone, and it was truly amazing – we had such a great time! The panels were excellent, with some of our favorite authors and content creators giving great talks, and events like live recordings from HPLHS, H P Lovecraft Literary Podcast, and Lovecraft eZine. The convention was very well run too – I particularly liked the way they set up the vendor room this year, versus setting the vendors up in the hallways like the last event.

Before the convention I had an idea – I had a number of books by authors and editors I really enjoy, like Joe Pulver and Ramsey Campbell, and I thought it might be cool to get them autographed. It was a big stack of books, though, and there are other content creators like Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey and Leeman Kessler who don’t really have books out, and I wanted to get their signatures as well. To solve this dilemma I created a big leather bound book full of crisp parchment pages – if you’re at a Lovecraft convention, why not go big, right? I wound up getting all the signatures I really wanted, and some additional authors who I just met at the convention as well. The whole thing came out great, all the people I asked to sign seemed genuinely happy to do so, and some even did artwork!

The whole convention and interaction with all these great creators inspires me so much, and I really want to continue my writing – I love weird fiction and horror in general and I love writing and being creative. I’m even more inspired since at least two of the panels we attended said that shorter stories and novellas are really the idea story length for horror and weird fiction – I’ve played around with short stories quite a bit and I’ve got lots of ideas.

And here’s my dilemma… I’m already pretty solidly engaged with dittomonster.com – I’ve been running the site for over 5 years now, I’ve got a loyal following of a few thousand people who really love Ditto and his friends, and the site is a positive influence on kids, the videos are shared by parents, stuff like that. I do videos, regular posts, gaming tips, and we do a regular podcast segment – it’s a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of work, and I’m well established.

Mysterious Observations in Providence and my other horror writings, on the other hand, are not well known and it’s hard to get a read on them – because they’re not well know and I don’t have a lot of followers, I rarely get feedback, so it’s hard to know if I’m getting better (of if I’m any good at all, to be honest…)

So if I keep up work on Dittomonster.com I don’t know if I can dedicate enough time to my horror work, but if I drop Dittomonster, which is already established, maybe the horror stuff could take off, or maybe I’d be leaving one established project with a lot of fans to focus on something that might never take off… I really have no idea…

I think for now I’m going to try to do both – keep up with Ditto and put more efforts into Mysterious Observations, plus some additional writing on the side. Maybe less TV and less sleep will help me get more done creatively. I’d love to start getting some work published, start making a name for myself (not as a furry orange monster) and maybe for Necronomicon 2017 I can be on one of those panels too…